Sunrise — 5:36, 5:37, 5:48.

Write about anything you want in the comments.

Here are 9 TikToks to amuse you this evening. Let me know what you like best.

1. A vertiginous walk.

2. Groundhogs.

3. A bird talks.

4. A bird sings.

5. Failing to account for the full length of the wind turbine rotor.

6. What do pro golfers think of the breakup of Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson?

7. Does your boyfriend really fit into your family?

8. What would you do with a $6,000 slo-mo camera?

9. "What exactly can a female provide in a plutonic relationship?"

Bill Maher thinks you're letting yourself go.

There’s a disturbing trend going on in America these days with rewriting science to fit ideology. We’ve gone from fat acceptance to fat celebration. pic.twitter.com/r0zmqtamUl

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) August 6, 2022

"In any case, many of us feel suspicious of the color-and-shape manipulations of these images. They're nudging us too much..."

"... insisting that we feel awe. It's a little like the January 6th Committee's over-produced show that insists that we feel anger and outrage. And some people don't think hardcore pornography is sexy. What X thinks is so sexy is exactly what makes it not sexy at all to Y. Maybe something subtler, something more real. Something human."

I blogged on July 14, as I resisted the hoopla, and noticed a column in WaPo by Alexandra Petri titled "James Webb Space Telescope images ranked by how good they look to eat."

Now, I see this in the news: "A prominent scientist posted an image of a distant star he said was taken by the Webb telescope. It was actually a slice of chorizo" (CBS).

The scientist, Etienne Klein, put up his silly post on July 31st, 17 days after Petri's jovial scribblings.

"Indiana became the first state in the country after the fall of Roe v. Wade to pass sweeping limits on abortion access...."

"The bill, which will go into effect Sept. 15, allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality or when the procedure is necessary to prevent severe health risks or death.... Before settling on the exceptions, Republican legislators disagreed on how far the law should go, with some GOP members siding with Democrats in demanding that abortion be legal in cases of rape and incest.... The push by Indiana Republicans to restrict abortion access stands in stark contrast with the overwhelming support for it by voters in Kansas... In Indiana, Democratic legislators described the Kansas vote as a warning to their Republican colleagues to consider the potential fallout from voters...."

WaPo reports.

"As far as Jim was concerned, life was about being forever young, and lusting after this and yearning after that. He was going to be 17 forever, and in some ways he was."

Said a friend of Jim Steinman’s, quoted in "A Gothic Rock Cottage Fit for a Bat Out of Hell/Jim Steinman spent years transforming his Connecticut house into a kind of rock ‘n’ roll museum. Now his friends are trying to sell it — with his belongings intact" (NYT).

Steinman wrote all the songs on the Meat Loaf album "Bat Out of Hell," and the headline's suggestion that the house fits the album title is pretty apt, based on the 24 photographs you'll see if you click there. Or look here, at the agent's website. 

Steinman lived alone in the house for 20 years. He spent $6 million making it a weird, wild place, and you can buy it for $5,555,569 — and that's "with all of Mr. Steinman’s personal belongings still inside." You can step into the forever-young loner's life. Or should I say "fly in" — like a bat out of — into? — hell? 

There's a big stainless steel sculpture that's supposed to look like the crystals in Superman's Fortress of Solitude. There's the Batmobile-themed wheelchair (which Steinman needed after his "series of strokes"). There's the bedroom with art that contains taxidermied bats and an alligator skull. There's the closet full of blue and gray clothes, "few of which he wore."

Here's what I'd advise. Buy it. Select a part of it to live in — it's 6,000 square feet — and open the rest of it as a museum. Here's the floor plan:

"Pop culture has long been obsessed with the prospect of male pregnancy, though it has mostly been used as a comedic gambit, as in the dismal 1978 farce 'Rabbit Test'...."

"[In] 'Rabbit Test,' Joan Rivers’s misanthropic comedy in which the aimless bachelor Lionel (Billy Crystal, in his first movie) miraculously conceives after a one-night stand with some pushy broad. Released at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, 'Rabbit Test' is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are. Its 'first pregnant man' conceit is just a setup for a carnival of broadly racist and sexist scenarios that evinces little interest in the reality of pregnancy itself. Lionel hardly looks pregnant, he hardly feels pregnant, and as his due date approaches, he is not concerned about how he is going to become un-pregnant. 'Rabbit Test' is so incurious about women’s experiences that it doesn’t even bother exploiting them. It’s just a movie about a guy with a pillow under his shirt."

From "Pregnant Men Were a Movie Punchline. Now They’re Horror Villains. The idea of the pregnant man has long been mined for Hollywood comedy. This summer, he becomes a menace" by Amanda Hess (NYT).

It was 1978. It was Joan Rivers. Shouldn't one try to gestate some viable reverence for our revered comedy foremother? 

Here, I found the whole thing on YouTube. Check it out. Is it really so bad? What if you had to appreciate it? Care for it. Nurture it:

Has an American President ever sung the national anthem into a microphone before a crowd?

I know President Obama sang "Amazing Grace" into a microphone — and "Let's Stay Together" — so we know he could sing into a microphone. Did any other President sing into a microphone? But what I really want to know is did any American President ever do this? — sing the national anthem into a microphone:

I found that because the Russian national anthem came up — 2 posts down — in the context of learning what lies in store for Brittney Griner if indeed she ends up serving her sentence in a Russian penal colony, where prisoners must sing the anthem, “Glory to Our Free Fatherland,” every morning at 6:05 a.m.

Brittney Griner, when she was a free woman in America, opposed the playing of the American National Anthem at basketball games. In 2020, she said: "I’m not going to be out there for the national anthem. If the league continues to want to play it, that’s fine... I’ll not be out there."

There's grisly irony, and I would not laugh at that harsh turn of fate. I've been thinking about the power of national anthems. Listening to a formal presentation of the Russian anthem, in spite of myself, I get chills. It's in the music. Look at the faces of the people, in that clip with Putin. It's reaching them deeply and merging them in shared resolve.

Resolve to do what? 

Would we Americans want a President who would sing our national anthem like that, or do we prefer our Presidents singing "Amazing Grace" and our anthem safely ensconced where it belongs, at basketball, baseball, and football games?

I've seen some mockery of the 25-year-old NYT op-ed writer who referred to the "bad vibes" economy.

On August 4th, the NYT published "The Vibes in the Economy Are … Weird. Really Weird" by Kyla Scanlon, who opined:

There is no recession yet. Right now we are in a “vibe-cession” of sorts — a period of declining expectations that people are feeling based on both real-world worries and past experiences. Things are off. And if they don’t improve, we will have to worry about more than bad vibes.

Instapundit quoted the Ace of Spades take, "New York Times Publishes Op-Ed From 25-Year-Old Female 'Economics Influencer' Absolving Biden of Blame for Economy and Instead Putting It Where It Belongs: On the 'Bad Vibes' The Public Is Putting Out About the Economy, Man."

I'm only writing about this to say that the 25-year-old did not introduce this "bad vibes" take to the NYT. The NYT has a senior economics correspondent named Neil Irwin, who writes at the NYT page called  The Upshot. Last December, he had a column called "What We Learned About the Economy in 2021/For once, the government tried overheating the economy. For better and worse, it succeeded." 

In surveys, Americans are remarkably unsatisfied with economic conditions. The growth numbers have been good. The vibes have been bad."

"Modern-day Russian penal colonies have become moneymaking enterprises... [E]very correctional facility has a production unit such as a sewing factory..."

"... or a woodworking or metalworking shop, with most of the profits going to intermediary companies buying and selling on low-cost goods, or to the prison authorities 'through kickbacks by companies that purchase the goods directly.'... [O]pposition politician Alexei Navalny... painted a grim picture of life inside Penal Colony No. 2, calling it 'our friendly concentration camp.' He accused guards of denying him proper medical care or the chance to sleep and described dehumanizing surveillance. Media investigations have reported abuse of prisoners at such facilities."

From "Brittney Griner may go to a Russian penal colony. Here’s what you need to know" (WaPo).

Here's the article linked at "our friendly concentration camp": "Putin foe Navalny once described prison life with dark humor. Now his messages are just dark" (WaPo). The "posts" in social media were made, we're told, by "anonymous members of his team," who have somehow received messages from Nalvany, messages written in his "familiar wry style":

Sunrise.

From the same place, but looking more toward the west:

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"[Catholicism is] more entertaining. I like saints: each one has a story. And it’s so good, you go into a little booth and say, 'I committed this sin,' get a little blessing..."

"... and you don’t have to pay for Freudian psychologists. It’s much cheaper and it works. The Catholic church is more open-minded towards humanity and its flaws."

Said Terry Gilliam, quoted in "Terry Gilliam: How I was squished by cancel culture/In his first interview since the Old Vic axed his musical, the director and former Python gives his side of the story on transgender rights, black lesbians and #MeToo" (London Times). 

 And there's this, about the 1960s and these kids today:

"The society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise was founded by a physician named Julia Barnett Rice in 1906."

Rice believed noise was unhealthy, and enlisted New York City’s gentry (including Mark Twain) to lobby for things like rules governing steamboat whistles, and silence pledges from children who played near hospitals. The group met in posh spaces like the St. Regis hotel, but Rice insisted that she was not solely interested in protecting New York’s upper class.... In 1909, the organization celebrated the passage of an ordinance that prohibited street vendors (many of them immigrants) from shouting, whistling, or ringing bells to promote their wares.....  Attempts to regulate the sounds of the city (car horns, ice-cream-truck jingles) continued throughout the 20th century, but... in the ’90s[, t]he city started going after boom boxes, car stereos, and nightclubs.... In 1991, the NYPD launched Operation Soundtrap, a campaign in which cops would trawl streets—often in majority-Black-and-brown communities—hunting for and confiscating cars with enhanced stereo systems.... When Rudy Giuliani became mayor in 1994, he used a cabaret-license law to force clubs out of gentrifying neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and Chelsea....New York was effectively codifying an elite sonic aesthetic: the systemic elevation of quiet over noise...."

From "Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? The sound of gentrification is silence" by Xochitl Gonzalez (The Atlantic).

Here are 8 TikToks to delight or vex you. Let me know what you think.

 1. "Ever since I was told that corn was real, it tasted good."

2. Yes, there is a burger bra. The question is what to wear with it.

3. For the European person — the coolest places in America.

4. Mr. Jeff's Musical Gizmos is open. 

5. Do you know the song my recently departed mother loved?

6. Getting searched at the San Francisco airport. (This can't be real, can it?)

7. Approaching the volcano in Iceland.

8. Glen Campbell and Leon Russell play "Jambalaya."

Taking the high road.

You've probably seen this 1977 interview before. This is a communications professor dissecting it:

Do you think he should have given Walters some credit for bringing out the best in Dolly? You could say that Walters behaved without vanity, lowering herself, to elicit what was a brilliant performance from Dolly. But that's not how the professor grades it.

"U.S. officials are starting to grumble about Ukraine and possible corruption. After months of having Americans bake Ukraine flag cupcakes..."

"... and fly Ukraine’s colors outside our houses, there’s a bit of hedging going on now. The government seems to be soft-rolling it, like in this Thomas Friedman piece: 'Privately, U.S. officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine’s leadership than they are letting on. There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine—considerably more than has been reported.' This is, after all, a former Soviet republic full of rent seekers and minigarchs, and you don’t become president without fraternizing with those people, and those people, well, they don’t just go away once you’re in power, and all the Vogue covers in the world can’t whitewash that."

Writes Nellie Bowles at Common Sense, reviewing the top stories in her column called "TGIF." She's also got this, about Afghanistan: